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U.S. stablecoin legislation took another major step on Wednesday as a House of Representatives committee joined Senate counterparts in advancing a bill to be considered by the overall House, bringing stablecoin regulations closer to reality.Eventual approvals in both the overall House and Senate would let lawmakers start melding the two versions into a unified piece of legislation that could get a final nod. Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump have aimed toward an August goal in getting the effort completed.Though the crypto industry and their most reliable Republican allies in Congress were happy to welcome many Democrats to the yes side on moving the Stablecoin Transparency and Accountability for a Better Ledger Economy (STABLE Act) out of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, the Democrats on the panel consistently raised concerns about Trump's connections to the industry and stablecoins. Still, five Democrats joined 27 Republicans on the committee to advance the bill after a marathon markup session. A week before the House committee focused on the bill in Wednesday's markup — a session in which lawmakers make changes and debate amendments on legislation — the Trump-tied World Liberty Financial (WLFI) announced it's supporting its own stablecoin (USD1). Trump has been highly active in crypto, including in selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and memecoin $TRUMP, even as he pushes for crypto-friendly policies at the federal level.U.S. regulation of stablecoins — generally dollar-tied tokens, such as Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC — is one of the two top policy priorities for the industry. And committee Chairman French Hill argued on the industry's behalf that "innovation needs guardrails, not roadblocks."Republican members declined to discuss President Trump's industry involvement in any explicit terms. When Waters and other Democrats pushed amendments to block the potential conflicts raised by the president's business interests and his direct authority over regulators who would make decisions about stablecoins, they were rejected by the panel's Republicans, who repeatedly called such protections "unnecessary.""We don't discriminate on entrepreneurs based on who they are and where they come from," Hill said. If the government wants clear guardrails around this space, he repeatedly argued, the best move is to pass the bill that establishes oversight. Representative Maxine Waters, the senior Democrat on the panel, said that Trump "leveraged the power of the presidency to establish multiple crypto schemes to enrich himself and his family," calling it a "display of greed.""He's unlike any other issuer, because he's the president of the United States," said Representative Stephen Lynch, the ranking Democrat on the panel's digital assets subcommittee, who argued Trump would be in a position to sign off on any government help needed by his own business interests were they to fail. "If this was a Democratic president who was trying to do this, the Republicans' hair would be on fire, and rightly so. This should not be happening."Another Democrat, Illinois Representative Sean Castin, argued that Tron's Justin Sun has put tens of millions of dollars into WLFI for no clear return other than its relationship to the Trump family. He contended that government officials tied to stablecoins could be influenced by foreign investors in a way that's hidden from public scrutiny. The Democratic arguments failed to move the committee's Republican majority, so no new amendments stuck to the effort. Supporters have said this House version is largely parallel to the Senate's. Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican, said the House version properly maintains sufficient authority in the hands of state regulators, which offers a "lighter touch, at times.""We have an administration that is ready to embrace these products, and the time is now," Huizenga said.This was one of a few bills before the House Financial Services Committee dealing with crypto-tied topics. Another piece of legislation debated on Wednesday was one that would form a cross-government group of law-enforcement agencies to address illicit crypto use and another that would ban U.S.-issued central bank digital currency (CBDC). Lawmakers also voted on dozens of amendments to the stablecoin bill before voting to advance the bill itself, prompting Rep. Lynch to joke that the panel may have set a record for the most failed votes in a row. The cross-government bill, the Financial Technology Protection Act, passed with unanimous support, 49-0. The anti-CBDC bill passed with 27 votes, with 22 lawmakers voting against. Though lawmakers initially had issues with their electronic voting system, they began making good time after starting votes near 10:30 p.m. ET – nearly 12.5 hours after the markup began. Voting on all five bills wrapped up by 11:15 p.m. ET. As the stablecoin bill continues to move forward, Trump is also poised to sign the first pro-crypto congressional action: a resolution that erases an Internal Revenue Service rule that targeted decentralized finance (DeFi) operations. The president is expected to sign the resolution, though he hasn't announced a schedule to do so.UPDATE (March 3, 2025, 01:15 UTC): Adds vote totals. ... Read more

Crypto exchange Kraken has registered as a restricted dealer in Canada, allowing the exchange to continue offering crypto trading services to Canadian users under the country’s evolving regulatory framework.The registration, announced on Tuesday, comes after a multi-year process that required exchanges to meet higher standards for investor protection and governance. Kraken said it worked closely with Canadian regulators during this pre-registration phase, upgrading its compliance systems and internal controls to meet expectations set by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC).To lead its Canadian expansion, Kraken named Cynthia Del Pozo as general manager for North America. Del Pozo, a fintech and operations veteran, will oversee strategy, regulatory engagement and business development across the region.“Canada is at a turning point for crypto adoption,” said Del Pozo in a statement, pointing to growing interest from both retail and institutional investors. A recent survey cited by Kraken found that 30% of Canadian investors currently hold crypto assets.Kraken also announced it will offer free Interac e-Transfer deposits for Canadian users, a move aimed at reducing friction for newcomers to the platform. The exchange claims it doubled its team and user base in Canada over the last two years and now manages over $2 billion CAD in client assets.Mayur Gupta, Kraken’s chief marketing officer and general manager of growth, will be speaking at CoinDesk's Consensus 2025 in Toronto on May 14-15.Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.... Read more

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Ben Schiller.In this issue:Vana launches token standardHashgraph to debut private blockchainASICs will look more like serversAn interview with Gensyn’s Ben FieldingThis article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.Network NewsVANA’S DATA-BACKED TOKEN STANDARD: Crypto enthusiasts might have heard of the ERC-20 token standard, which provides guidelines to ensure that tokens created on the Ethereum smart contract blockchain are compatible and can interact with other tokens and applications within the network. A similar standard for data-backed tokens, called VRC-20, has now emerged. Vana, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain that helps users monetize personal data by bundling it into DataDAOs for AI model training, introduced the new standard early this week to boost trust and transparency in the market for data-backed digital assets. The VRC-20 standard design includes specific criteria such as fixed supply, governance, and liquidity rules while ensuring real data access by tying tokens to actual data utility. Additionally, it promotes continuous liquidity through rewards that ensure market stability. "This isn’t speculation. This is real financialization of data," Vana noted on X. Vana launched its mainnet in December, with VANA as its native cryptocurrency. Since then, the network has onboarded over 12 million data points through multiple DataDAOs, reflecting strong demand for user-owned data. DataDAOs or data liquidity pools are decentralized marketplaces that bring data on-chain as transferable digital tokens. DLPs are where data is contributed, tokenized and made ready for use in applications such as AI model training. — Omkar Godbole Read more.HASHGRAPH LINES UP Q3 PRIVATE CHAIN: Hashgraph, the blockchain development firm focusing on the Hedera (HBAR) network, is building a private, permissioned blockchain for enterprises in highly regulated industries with plans to debut in the third quarter of 2025. HashSphere, built with Hedera's technology, aims to bridge private and public distributed ledgers, ensuring compliance with regulations while maintaining interoperability, the company said Monday. Hashgraph is looking to provide services to asset managers, banks and payment providers seeking secure, low-cost cross-border transactions with stablecoins.While public blockchains offer security and transparency, enterprises in industries like finance and payments often face compliance challenges, particularly with know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements. HashSphere addresses this by restricting access to verified participants, enabling firms to develop tokenized assets, AI-powered services and other blockchain-based products while meeting regulatory standards. The network also integrates Hedera’s existing tools, including the Token Service for managing digital assets and the Consensus Service for recording transactions with trusted timestamps. The platform is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing developers to deploy decentralized applications using Solidity and other EVM languages. — Kris Sandor Read more.ASICS TO BE MORE LIKE SERVERS: In the beginning, there were only CPUs, then GPUs, for bitcoin mining. Then came the mighty ASIC in 2013, and with it, the “shoebox” form factor that has become emblematic of the bitcoin mining industry. What comes next? ASIC manufacturers are increasingly betting on a hydro-cooled server rack design to become a substantial portion of bitcoin mining fleets, leaning into the “direct-to-chip” cooling for further efficiency gains. Last September, Bitmain announced its model U3S21EXPH developed in a partnership with Hut 8. Its U3 design means that one unit takes up three spaces in a traditional server rack. MicroBT soon followed with its M63 Hydro series, as did Bitdeer’s Sealminer A2 Hydro unit. Following suit, Auradine released its server rack model, the AH3880, this March. Its U2 design, which occupies two server slots, is a bit smaller, but it packs more hashrate per unit of space at 600 TH/s (or 300 TH/s per slot) versus Bitmain’s 860 TH/s (286.66 TH/s per slot). The benefit of a server rack ASIC lies in standardization. Bitcoin miners are increasingly marching in step with the traditional datacenter industry, and that industry could see 40% adoption of direct liquid-to-chip cooling by 2026, according to data center developer Cyrus One. If miners adopt this design, then theoretically, they can optimize their supply chains by converging on server designs that are becoming best practice in the big-boy data center sector. — Colin Harper, Blockspace Read more.GENSYN CEO BEN FIELDING: Ten years ago, when he was still a young AI researcher beginning his PhD track, Ben Fielding explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned by Google and other Big Tech. Compute constraints would always be an issue, he realized. The solution? Decentralized AI. Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute, but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack. And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold. Fielding talked with Jeff Wilser about AI Swarms, how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators — not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.” — Jeff Wilser Read more.In Other NewsWeb3 lacks a dedicated memory layer, making its current architecture inefficient and difficult to scale. Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) offers a solution by enhancing data propagation and storage efficiency in decentralized systems. Implementing RLNC can address Web3's scalability challenges by optimizing memory and data access without compromising decentralization, says Muriel Médard, co-founder of Optimum. Read her op-ed here.Ripple, an enterprise-focused blockchain service closely tied to the XRP Ledger (XRP), said on Wednesday it has integrated its stablecoin to the company's cross-border payments system to boost adoption for Ripple USD (RLUSD). Select Ripple Payments customers including cross-border payment providers BKK Forex and iSend are already using the stablecoin to improve their treasury operations, the company said. Ripple plans to further expand the token's availability of its token to payments customers. RLUSD reached a $244 million market capitalization, growing 87% over the past month. — Kris Sandor reports.Regulatory and PolicyThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped or paused over a dozen ongoing cases (and lost one) since U.S. President Donald Trump retook office just over two months ago and appointed Commissioner Mark Uyeda as acting chair. Here is a rundown of what’s left on the SEC’s enforcement docket. — Nik De reports.CalendarApril 8-10: Paris Blockchain WeekApril 30-May 1: Token 2049, DubaiMay 14-16: Consensus, TorontoMay 20-22: Avalanche Summit, LondonMay 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las VegasJune 30-July 3: EthCC, CannesOct. 1-2: Token2049, Singapore... Read more

In a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he intends to immediately sign an order for "reciprocal tariffs" to be levied against U.S. trading partners."Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years but it’s not going to happen anymore," said Trump, adding that the tariffs will begin at midnight.The first specific tariff announced at the ceremony was a 25% levy on all foreign-made autos.Among country-specific tariffs: China will see a rate of 34%, Vietnam 46%, Taiwan 32% South Korea 25%, European Union 20%, Switzerland 31%.The price of bitcoin (BTC) initially rose in the ceremony's early stages, but began to give ground as the tariffs were detailed. The price has retreated to $86,000, down about 1% from prior to the announcements.U.S. stock index futures are plunging, with the Nasdaq 100 lower by 2.3% and the S&P 500 by 1.7%. Gold, meanwhile, shot higher to a new record high just below $3,200 per ounce.... Read more

The HBAR Foundation has teamed up with the founder of internet subscription site OnlyFans, Tim Stokely, in a bid to acquire Chinese social media app TikTok, according to a new Reuters report.Stokely and the HBAR Foundation submitted a bid last week to the White House through the former’s new family-friendly crowdfunding company, Zoop, Reuters said."Our bid for TikTok isn't just about changing ownership, it's about creating a new paradigm where both creators and their communities benefit directly from the value they generate," Zoop co-founder RJ Phillips told Reuters.The HBAR Foundation is the entity behind Hedera (HBAR), a proof-of-stake smart contract platform that launched in 2018. With a market capitalization of $7.2 billion, HBAR is the 22nd-largest cryptocurrency in existence as of press time. The coin only reacted mildly to the news and is up 1.5% in the last 24 hours.The duo’s bid for TikTok isn’t the only one on the market. Online retailing giant Amazon (AMZN) is also looking to acquire the platform, according to The New York Times.The HBAR Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.... Read more

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the world’s largest securities settlement system, is pushing deeper into crypto with introducing a blockchain-based platform for tokenized collateral management.Collateral is a fundamental part of risk management in financial markets, ensuring stability amid market fluctuations. However, traditional systems often suffer from inefficiencies due to fragmented infrastructure and lagging settlements.DTCC said its new platform seeks to address these challenges by tokenizing collateral on blockchain rails, allowing for real-time transfers and automation through smart contracts, according to a Wednesday press release. The platform runs within DTCC’s AppChain ecosystem, which was developed on top of LF Decentralized Trust’s Besu blockchain.Read more: Why Asset Tokenization Is Inevitable"Collateral mobility is the ‘killer app’ for institutional use of blockchain," Dan Doney, chief technology officer of DTCC Digital Assets, said in a statement. "By using smart contracts to automate the full range of collateral operations, we enable complex trade execution across markets in real-time at any time, even in volatile conditions.""This platform is unique in that we’ve created something that’s more open, flexible, dynamic, and comprehensive than any previous digital collateral initiative," said Nadine Chakar, global head of DTCC Digital Assets.The initiative comes as tokenization of traditional financial instruments such as bonds, funds and other traditional investments has become one of the hottest use cases for blockchain technology. Multiple financial heavyweights like BlackRock, CME Group and Fidelity have thrown their hat in the ring pursuing benefits such as operational efficiencies, speedier settlements and increased transparency compared to using traditional financial plumbing.DTCC will showcase the platform’s capabilities at the "The Great Collateral Experiment" event on April 23, where industry participants will test how tokenized assets can be mobilized across markets. The company said it also plans to engage with regulators and industry leaders to establish global standards for tokenized collateral.... Read more

Galaxy Digital UK, the subsidiary of Mike Novogratz-led digital asset financial services firm's application for a license to execute derivatives trading in the U.K. has been approved by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).The firm's Investment Banking arm will also use Galaxy Digital UK’s FCA authorization to provide capital raising and investment banking services, according to a statement on Wednesday. The Galaxy U.K. subsidiary will also support its asset management business with fund distribution activities.Galaxy Digital UK is on the FCA's investment firms register, which is for firms authorized to perform MiFID investment services or activities. Galaxy also joined the FCA's crypto register in 2021.“London is a critical financial hub, and this authorisation allows us to deepen our presence in the U.K., aligning with our mission to bridge traditional finance with the digital asset ecosystem,” Leon Marshall, CEO of Galaxy Europe and Global Head of Sales said.The U.K. has attracted crypto companies like Coinbase, Bitpanda and most recently assigned BlackRock a slot on its crypto register.... Read more

It started with a noisy desk. The desk was a wooden cubicle in a lab at Northumbria University, in northern England, where a young AI researcher began his PhD track. This was in 2015. The researcher was Ben Fielding, who had built a large machine stuffed with early GPUs to develop AI. The machine was so loud it annoyed Fielding’s lab-mates. Fielding crammed the machine beneath the desk, but it was so big he had to awkwardly stick his legs to the side.Fielding had some unorthodox ideas. He explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned. “Google was doing this research as well,” Fielding says now. “And they had thousands [of GPUs] in a data center. The things they were doing weren’t crazy. I knew the methods... I had lots of proposals, but I couldn’t run them.”Ben Fielding, CEO of Gensyn, is a speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.Jeff Wilser is the host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast and will host The AI Summit at Consensus 2025.So a decade ago, it dawned on Fielding: Compute constraints would always be an issue. In 2015, he knew that if compute was a hard constraint in academia, it would absolutely be a hard constraint when AI went mainstream.The solution?Decentralized AI.Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute – and I’ve spoken with Fielding about this for CoinDesk and on panel after panel at conferences – but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack.And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold.In this conversation leading up to the AI Summit, at Consensus in Toronto, Fielding gives a primer on AI Swarms, explains how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators -- not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.”This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Congrats on the testnet launch. What’s the gist of what it is?Ben Fielding: It’s the addition of the first MVP features of blockchain integration with what we've launched so far.What were those original features, pre-blockchain?So we launched RL [Reinforcement Learning] Swarm a few weeks ago, which is reinforcement learning, post-training, as a peer-to-peer network.Here’s the easiest way to think about it. When a pre-trained model goes through reasoning training – like DeepSeek-R1 – it learns to critique its own thinking and recursively improve against the task. It can then improve its own answer.We take that process one step further and say, “It’s great for models to critique their own thinking and recursively improve. What if they can talk to other models and critique each other's thinking?” If you get many models together in a group that can all talk to each other, they can start learning how to send information to the other models… with the overall goal of improving the entire swarm itself.Gotcha, which explains the name “Swarm.”Right. It’s this training method which allows many models to kind of combine, in parallel, to improve the outcome of a final meta-model that you could create from those models. But at the same time, you have every single individual model just improving on its own. So if you were to come along with a model on a MacBook, join a swarm for an hour and then drop back out again, you would have an improved local model based on the knowledge in the swarm, and you would have also improved the other models in the swarm. It’s this collaborative training process that any model can join and any model can do. So that's what RL Swarm is.Okay, so that’s what you released a few weeks ago. Now where does blockchain come in?So the blockchain is us moving forward some of the lower-level primitives into the system.Let’s just pretend that someone doesn’t understand the phrase “lower-level primitives.” What do you mean by that?Yeah, so I mean, very close to the resource itself. So if you think about the software stack, you've got a GPU stack in a data center. You've got drivers on top of the GPU. You've got operating systems, virtual machines. You've got all this stuff going up.So a lower-level primitive is the closest to the bottom foundation in the tech stack. Am I getting that right?Yes, exactly. And the RL Swarm is a demonstration of what's possible, basically. It's just a somewhat hacky demo of doing really interesting large-scale, scalable machine learning. But what Gensyn's been doing for the past four-plus years, realistically, is building infrastructure. And so we're in this period now where the infrastructure is all at that v0.1 sort of beta level. It's all done. It's ready to go. We have to figure out how to show the world what's possible when it's quite a big shift to the way people think of machine learning.It sounds like you guys are doing a lot more than decentralized compute, or even infrastructure?We have three main components that sit underneath our infrastructure. Execution – we have consistent execution libraries. We have our own compiler. We have reproducible libraries for any hardware target.The second piece is communication. So assume you can just run a model on any device in the world that's compatible, can you get them to talk to each other? If everybody opts into the same standard, everybody can communicate like TCP/IP from the internet, basically. So we build those libraries and RL Swarm is an example of that communication.And then, finally, verification.Ah, and I’m guessing this is where blockchain comes in…Imagine a scenario where every device in the world is executing consistently. They could link models together. But can they trust each other? If I connected my MacBook to yours, yes, they could execute the same tasks. Yes, they could send tensors back and forth, but do they know that what they send to the other device is actually happening on the other device or not?In the current world, you and I would probably sign a contract to say, yes, we agree that we'll make sure our devices do the right thing. In the machine world, it needs to happen programmatically. So that's the final piece we build, cryptographic proofs, probabilistic proofs, game theoretic proofs to make that process entirely programmatic.So that's where the blockchain comes in. It gives us all of the benefits of blockchain you can imagine, like persistent identity, payments, consensus, etc. And so what we're doing with the testnet now is taking RL Swarm and the primitives of the other infrastructure and we're adding in the blockchain components and saying, ‘Hey, when you join a swarm now, you have a persistent identity, which exists out there on a decentralized ledger.’In the future you’ll have the ability to make payments, but right now, you have that trust consensus mechanism where we can terminate disputes. So, it's kind of an MVP of the future Gensyn infrastructure, where we’re going to add in components as we go.Give us a tease of what’s coming down the pipeline?When we reach main-net, all of the software and infrastructure is live against blockchain as the source of trust, payments, consensus, etc., identity. This is the first step of that. It's adding identity in and saying when you join a swarm, you can register as the same person. Everyone knows who you are without having to check some centralized server or website somewhere.Now let’s get wild and talk further in the future. What does this look like one year from now, two years from now, five years from now? What’s your North Star?Sure. The ultimate vision is to take all of the resources that sit under machine learning and make them instantaneously programmatically accessible to everyone. Machine learning is heavily constrained by its core resources. This creates this huge moat for centralized AI companies, but it doesn't need to exist. It can be open-sourced if we can build the right software. So our view is Gensyn builds all of the low-level infrastructure to allow that to get as close to open-source as it possibly can. People should have the right to build machine learning technologies. ... Read more

It started with a noisy desk. The desk was a wooden cubicle in a lab at Northumbria University, in northern England, where a young AI researcher began his PhD track. This was in 2015. The researcher was Ben Fielding, who had built a large machine stuffed with early GPUs to develop AI. The machine was so loud it annoyed Fielding’s lab-mates. Fielding crammed the machine beneath the desk, but it was so big he had to awkwardly stick his legs to the side.Fielding had some unorthodox ideas. He explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned. “Google was doing this research as well,” Fielding says now. “And they had thousands [of GPUs] in a data center. The things they were doing weren’t crazy. I knew the methods... I had lots of proposals, but I couldn’t run them.”Ben Fielding, CEO of Gensyn, is a speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.Jeff Wilser is the host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast and will host The AI Summit at Consensus 2025.So a decade ago, it dawned on Fielding: Compute constraints would always be an issue. In 2015, he knew that if compute was a hard constraint in academia, it would absolutely be a hard constraint when AI went mainstream.The solution?Decentralized AI.Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute – and I’ve spoken with Fielding about this for CoinDesk and on panel after panel at conferences – but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack.And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold.In this conversation leading up to the AI Summit, at Consensus in Toronto, Fielding gives a primer on AI Swarms, explains how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators -- not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.”This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Congrats on the testnet launch. What’s the gist of what it is?Ben Fielding: It’s the addition of the first MVP features of blockchain integration with what we've launched so far.What were those original features, pre-blockchain?So we launched RL [Reinforcement Learning] Swarm a few weeks ago, which is reinforcement learning, post-training, as a peer-to-peer network.Here’s the easiest way to think about it. When a pre-trained model goes through reasoning training – like DeepSeek-R1 – it learns to critique its own thinking and recursively improve against the task. It can then improve its own answer.We take that process one step further and say, “It’s great for models to critique their own thinking and recursively improve. What if they can talk to other models and critique each other's thinking?” If you get many models together in a group that can all talk to each other, they can start learning how to send information to the other models… with the overall goal of improving the entire swarm itself.Gotcha, which explains the name “Swarm.”Right. It’s this training method which allows many models to kind of combine, in parallel, to improve the outcome of a final meta-model that you could create from those models. But at the same time, you have every single individual model just improving on its own. So if you were to come along with a model on a MacBook, join a swarm for an hour and then drop back out again, you would have an improved local model based on the knowledge in the swarm, and you would have also improved the other models in the swarm. It’s this collaborative training process that any model can join and any model can do. So that's what RL Swarm is.Okay, so that’s what you released a few weeks ago. Now where does blockchain come in?So the blockchain is us moving forward some of the lower-level primitives into the system.Let’s just pretend that someone doesn’t understand the phrase “lower-level primitives.” What do you mean by that?Yeah, so I mean, very close to the resource itself. So if you think about the software stack, you've got a GPU stack in a data center. You've got drivers on top of the GPU. You've got operating systems, virtual machines. You've got all this stuff going up.So a lower-level primitive is the closest to the bottom foundation in the tech stack. Am I getting that right?Yes, exactly. And the RL Swarm is a demonstration of what's possible, basically. It's just a somewhat hacky demo of doing really interesting large-scale, scalable machine learning. But what Gensyn's been doing for the past four-plus years, realistically, is building infrastructure. And so we're in this period now where the infrastructure is all at that v0.1 sort of beta level. It's all done. It's ready to go. We have to figure out how to show the world what's possible when it's quite a big shift to the way people think of machine learning.It sounds like you guys are doing a lot more than decentralized compute, or even infrastructure?We have three main components that sit underneath our infrastructure. Execution – we have consistent execution libraries. We have our own compiler. We have reproducible libraries for any hardware target.The second piece is communication. So assume you can just run a model on any device in the world that's compatible, can you get them to talk to each other? If everybody opts into the same standard, everybody can communicate like TCP/IP from the internet, basically. So we build those libraries and RL Swarm is an example of that communication.And then, finally, verification.Ah, and I’m guessing this is where blockchain comes in…Imagine a scenario where every device in the world is executing consistently. They could link models together. But can they trust each other? If I connected my MacBook to yours, yes, they could execute the same tasks. Yes, they could send tensors back and forth, but do they know that what they send to the other device is actually happening on the other device or not?In the current world, you and I would probably sign a contract to say, yes, we agree that we'll make sure our devices do the right thing. In the machine world, it needs to happen programmatically. So that's the final piece we build, cryptographic proofs, probabilistic proofs, game theoretic proofs to make that process entirely programmatic.So that's where the blockchain comes in. It gives us all of the benefits of blockchain you can imagine, like persistent identity, payments, consensus, etc. And so what we're doing with the testnet now is taking RL Swarm and the primitives of the other infrastructure and we're adding in the blockchain components and saying, ‘Hey, when you join a swarm now, you have a persistent identity, which exists out there on a decentralized ledger.’In the future you’ll have the ability to make payments, but right now, you have that trust consensus mechanism where we can terminate disputes. So, it's kind of an MVP of the future Gensyn infrastructure, where we’re going to add in components as we go.Give us a tease of what’s coming down the pipeline?When we reach main-net, all of the software and infrastructure is live against blockchain as the source of trust, payments, consensus, etc., identity. This is the first step of that. It's adding identity in and saying when you join a swarm, you can register as the same person. Everyone knows who you are without having to check some centralized server or website somewhere.Now let’s get wild and talk further in the future. What does this look like one year from now, two years from now, five years from now? What’s your North Star?Sure. The ultimate vision is to take all of the resources that sit under machine learning and make them instantaneously programmatically accessible to everyone. Machine learning is heavily constrained by its core resources. This creates this huge moat for centralized AI companies, but it doesn't need to exist. It can be open-sourced if we can build the right software. So our view is Gensyn builds all of the low-level infrastructure to allow that to get as close to open-source as it possibly can. People should have the right to build machine learning technologies. ... Read more

FDUSD, the stablecoin issued by Hong Kong-based First Digital, has wobbled from its $1 price peg as investor concerns mounted over its reserves, though the company said Wednesday that it was "completely solvent."FDUSD has dropped to 0.87 against Tether's USDT stablecoin and 0.76 against Circle's USDC on Binance, the main exchange where FDUSD is listed. Notably, bitcoin (BTC) also nearly hit 100,000 against FDUSD. The token has stabilized around $0.98-$0.96 later, still trading below its supposed price anchor.The sudden price action happened as CoinDesk earlier Wednesday reported that some of the TrueUSD stablecoin's reserve assets were stuck in illiquid investments, according to filings. Tron founder Justin Sun bailed out the issuer company. First Digital Trust, a trust company affiliated to First Digital, was appointed to manage TUSD reserves. "First Digital Trust (FDT) is effectively insolvent and unable to fulfill client fund redemptions. I strongly recommend that users take immediate action to secure their assets," Tron founder Justin Sun claimed in a Wednesday X post. First Digital refuted the allegations in an X post, saying that "First Digital is completely solvent" and "every dollar backing FDUSD is completely, secure, safe and accounted for with US backed T-Bills.""This is a typical Justin Sun smear campaign to try to attack a competitor to his business. As we told the reporter at CoinDesk, we have not yet had the opportunity to defend ourselves and instead of letting the TUSD matter be dealt with in court, Justin has instead resorted to a coordinated social media effort to try to damage FDUSD as a business competitor," the company said. "FDT will pursue legal action to protect its rights and reputation." FDUSD's latest monthly reserve report showed that the $2 billion of reserve assets were held mostly in U.S. Treasury bills and a lesser part in repo facilities and fixed deposits.UPDATE (Apr. 2, 17:15): Updated FDUSD price action.... Read more

Avalanche's AVAX token is poised for major gains in coming years that should outpace already bullish outlooks for both bitcoin and ether, according to Standard Chartered's Geoff Kendrick.“The unique thing about Avalanche is how it is attempting to achieve scale. Unlike Ethereum or Solana, Avalanche (AVAX) uses a set of subnets, or sidechains,” Kendrick said in a note on Wednesday, initiating coverage on AVAX with a $55 price target for the end of 2025, $100 for 2026, $150 for 2027, $200 for 2028 and $250 by the completion of 2029.“While it is still too early to tell whether the new subnet approach will work, we think the fact that one-quarter of active subnets are already Etna-compatible is encouraging.”He also pointed out the network’s growing developer number since its upgrade in December, which cut the cost of establishing a subnet close to zero.Avalanche, which stands at a $9 billion market cap, is currently the 15th-largest cryptocurrency by that metric, making it a great candidate to profit from a big impact even through incremental improvements, according to Kendrick. Among blockchains, it is the tenth-largest by total value locked (TVL).“As a result, we see AVAX outperforming both Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of relative price gains in the coming years, reaching a level around USD 250 by end-2029, more than 10x today’s price.”Ahead of the December upgrade, the Avalanche Foundation, the issuer of AVAX, raised $250 million in a token sale, led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly and ParaFi Capital.... Read more

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) may be well off their frothy heights, but don't tell that to Jupiter. Solana's top DeFi exchange just brought digital collectibles platform DRiP Haus into its orbit.The acquisition is part of Jupiter's push to become what Jupiter's Kash Dhanda calls the "Solana super app:" a home not only for traders of financial instruments like swaps and perps, but for digital culture connoisseurs too."We don't believe it," Dhanda said of the NFT doomsayers. "We think NFTs are here for the long term."Built from the bricks of the short-lived Solana store, DRiP Haus survived the NFT market's brutal downturn as a digital collectibles distribution hub. Instead of trading it focuses on disseminating: Startups across Solanaland spin up and send out their visual campaigns on DRiP, according to Dhanda, who estimates it now creates the vast majority of Solana NFTs that "aren't spam."Dhanda and DRiP Labs founder Vibhu Norby both declined to state how much Jupiter paid in the all-cash deal. A person familiar with the deal estimated it at two times the funds raised. The startup previously raised $11.5 million from venture investors.Jupiter co-founder Meow hinted at the acquisition in late February during his campaign to defer a multi-million dollar token payday, which yields more JUP for him later while funding token incentive programs for acqui-hired teams now. Norby confirmed his team will be getting tokens from the incentives program.Half of DRiP's eight-person team will continue working on the distribution platform, while the other half will focus on bolstering Jupiter's currently nonexistent NFT capabilities, most critically by adding a swaps router to the DeFi exchange's homepage.Norby will oversee DRiP from an "executive, strategic point of view" from within Jupiter. While the DRiP brand will remain separate, Norby said its visual identity will be reworked to align more closely with the new mothership. He's also working on building a "really, really excellent NFT experience" within Jupiter's mobile app.... Read more

Once considered speculative investments, cryptocurrencies are becoming increasingly mainstream. In Europe, WisdomTree is at the forefront of leading that charge. The global financial services firm offers a number of exchange-traded products (ETPs) that offer diversification and an incredibly easy way to buy and sell crypto assets.Here Dovile Silenskyte, WisdomTree’s Director of Digital Assets Research, discusses crypto’s evolution as an asset class, the most recent adoption trends and WisdomTree’s latest ETP based on the CoinDesk 20 index.How do you see crypto becoming more akin to a traditional asset class?As with every asset class, diversification is essential. Investors diversify across and within equity and bond positions, so it should be no different when considering allocating capital to cryptocurrencies. Relying solely on bitcoin is akin to holding only one stock in an equity portfolio, which is a suboptimal strategy in terms of risk-adjusted returns. A well-diversified approach across multiple digital assets can enhance exposure to the broader growth of the sector.As the digital asset class evolves, investors require a benchmark to measure performance, invest and trade. The CoinDesk 20 index serves as the benchmark index for the crypto industry and is the world’s most traded crypto index — it could be viewed as the S&P 500 of crypto. Taking a broad and diversified approach through the CoinDesk 20 provides a practical way to access opportunities across the digital asset market.For investors who lack access to deep crypto knowledge, broad-based crypto indices offer a streamlined way to gain market exposure without the complexities of token selection. Just as ETF investors use index-based funds to gain equity exposure without stock-picking, a diversified crypto index allows for systematic, passive participation in the growth of digital assets.What kind of adoption trends have you seen in the past? Are there geographical nuances you’ve observed?After more than 15 years of existence, multiple boom-and-bust cycles and over half a billion users, cryptocurrencies have cemented their place as a major asset class rather than a passing trend. Bitcoin and ether have become integral components of institutional portfolios.Despite cryptocurrencies' long-term growth potential, many investors are still unsure. With a total market cap of approximately $3 trillion, the ecosystem and use cases are growing steadily. The crypto market is now of a similar (or larger) size as staple institutional investments such as high-yield bonds, inflation-linked bonds and emerging markets small caps.Crypto adoption is not monolithic — it varies across geographies based on regulatory landscapes, institutional infrastructure and economic needs. Europe is leading the way with investors being able to invest into bitcoin exchange-traded products for the last 5+ years and now having access to a broad range of single coin and crypto basket ETPs.How is WisdomTree enabling this next phase of growth beyond bitcoin?WisdomTree has been providing access to crypto via ETPs since 2019. It has since grown its range to include ETPs providing exposure to five other individual coins and four diversified basket products, including its new ETP providing exposure to the CoinDesk 20. WisdomTree's crypto ETPs leverage institutional-grade storage solutions ensuring high levels of security, and some of them also generate a staking yield. By incorporating staking into a crypto ETP, investors can gain exposure to the growth of these networks while also participating in their security and governance.Tell us more about the WisdomTree Physical CoinDesk 20 ETP that you just launched.The strategy helps investors avoid the complexities of selecting individual assets, as it aims to provide secure and diversified exposure to approximately 90% of the crypto market by market cap, helping shape the next wave of innovation. The strategy also provides a highly diversified entry point into the crypto ecosystem, further democratizing access to a historically difficult part of the market to get exposure to. And finally, the strategy also aims to provide staking yield.Where can someone get additional information?European investors can access more information about WisdomTree’s physically-backed crypto ETP range here.Disclosure: This material is prepared by WisdomTree and its affiliates and is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast, research or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt any investment strategy. The opinions expressed are as of the date of production and may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this material are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources. As such, no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given and no responsibility arising in any other way for errors and omissions (including responsibility to any person by reason of negligence) is accepted by WisdomTree, nor any affiliate, nor any of their officers, employees or agents. Reliance upon information in this material is at the sole discretion of the reader. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.Authors' views and opinions are their own and not associated with CoinDesk Indices. The interview was conducted by CoinDesk Indices and is not associated with CoinDesk editorial.CoinDesk Indices, Inc., including CC Data Limited, its affiliate which performs certain outsourced administration and calculation services on its behalf (collectively, “CoinDesk Indices”), does not sponsor, endorse, sell, promote, or manage any investment offered by any third party that seeks to provide an investment return based on the performance of any index. CoinDesk Indices is neither an investment adviser nor a commodity trading advisor and makes no representation regarding the advisability of making an investment linked to any CoinDesk Indices index. CoinDesk Indices does not act as a fiduciary. A decision to invest in any asset linked to a CoinDesk Indices index should not be made in reliance on any of the statements set forth in this document or elsewhere by CoinDesk Indices. All content displayed here or otherwise used in connection with any CoinDesk Indices index (the “Content”) is owned by CoinDesk Indices and/or its third-party data providers and licensors, unless stated otherwise by CoinDesk Indices. CoinDesk Indices does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, adequacy, validity, or availability of any of the Content. CoinDesk Indices is not responsible for any errors or omissions, regardless of the cause, in the results obtained from the use of any of the Content. CoinDesk Indices does not assume any obligation to update the Content following publication in any form or format. © 2025 CoinDesk Indices, Inc. All rights reserved.... Read more

The spot bitcoin ETFs saw sizable inflows in the first quarter despite the lame price action and at least one analyst sees the next three months as even bigger even if the prices don't recover.“Even if current market conditions persist in the second quarter, we are seeing strong traction from financial advisors and institutional investors," said Juan Leon, senior investment strategist at Bitwise (whose BITB is among the bitcoin ETFs)."While retail interest is weak due to the fixation on price action, professional investors are recognizing the global adoption momentum spurred by the Trump administration’s embrace of bitcoin, and many are seeing these market conditions as an opportunity to start or increase an allocation," Leon added.The ETFs saw over $1 billion in inflows in the first quarter of the year despite a challenging macro situation that sent the S&P 500 Index into its biggest quarterly loss since 2022 and bitcoin's 13% plunge.Leon expects inflows to be even stronger in the second quarter — as much as $3 billion or even more as wirehouse platforms unlock and legislative policy progresses.ETF inflows possibly less than meets the eyeThe $1 billion in first quarter net flows — and whatever the second quarter brings — doesn't necessarily reflect investor interest in buying the bitcoin dip. That's because of the so-called basis trade (also known as cash-and-carry). In this, institutional players buy the spot bitcoin ETF while shorting CME bitcoin futures, picking up yield without exposure to price movement.That yield was well into the double-digits in late 2024 and remained nicely above the risk-free rate throughout much of the first quarter. It's collapsed to the 5% area of late, suggesting arbitrage-related ETF inflows may dry up.Back to bull case: It's still early“While a favorable price environment would certainly be a boost, it's important to remember that adoption of spot bitcoin ETFs by these groups is still in its infancy," said Nate Geraci, president of the ETF Store, who is also bullish on the outlook for inflows throughout the rest of the year.. "As they grow more comfortable allocating to bitcoin, this should provide a meaningful tailwind for inflows,” he added..,While many institutions have indeed already made their first allocations into bitcoin in the past year, it represents only a small fraction of ETF investment, with most of the money still coming from retail investors — something recently noted by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whose IBIT is the asset-gathering leader among the spot ETFs. The more favorable regulatory stance toward the industry, not to mention the government’s own potential allocation into bitcoin, however, means that ratio could soon shift significantly.During an ETF conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, a survey showed that 57% of advisors plan on increasing their allocations into crypto ETFs this year as crypto has lost its “reputational risk” attribute among advisors.The view that bitcoin could serve as a “safe haven” in times of an economic decline, which investors remain anxious about, could also boost confidence in the asset, especially as fears of a potential recession grow.“If we see continued rate cut expectations, signs of economic uncertainty, or deepening fears of a potential recession in the US, Bitcoin’s role as 'digital gold' will likely support additional inflows,” said David Siemer, CEO of Wave Digital Assets. “While some short-term traders may rotate out if price weakness persists, long-term players will continue to keep inflows strong, especially as institutional adoption takes off and drives demand throughout the year."... Read more

The crypto industry's primary political action committee, Fairshake, flooded support to Republican candidates in the U.S. House of Representatives special elections this week in Florida that aimed to fill vacant seats in Congress. Both candidates won, further reinforcing the party's narrow national majority.The two seats in Florida had been vacated when President Donald Trump tapped the previous members to join his administration, including his national security advisor, Michael Waltz, and the congressman Trump initially picked as attorney general, Matt Gaetz, who quickly bowed out under the pressure of accusations that he'd had sex with a minor and was linked to illegal drug use.Florida voters elected state Senator Randy Fine to take Waltz's former seat and picked the state's chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, to replace Gaetz. The races drew a high level of attention and money from both parties, because of every seat's importance to the tight majority in the House. While Democrats failed to steer the conservative districts onto their side, they did win much more support in both districts than they had in the recent 2024 elections.An affiliate of the Fairshake PAC had paid for advertising supporting the pro-crypto candidates, Patronis and Fine, in the primary and general elections in Florida, including a last-minute $1.5 million to help ensure their victory."We are thrilled to see two strong champions of innovation headed to Washington," said Fairshake spokesman Josh Vlasto, in a statement. "Both leaders have shown a deep commitment to advancing pro-growth policies and ensuring the United States leads the world in crypto and digital assets innovation."The arrival of both in the House leaves just two vacancies there because of deaths of Democrat members from Texas and Arizona.... Read more